[SCL] Re: Common Logic status with respect to standards

[John F. Sowa]

Pat,

I am willing to do the work wherever the action is.

>John, as I keep reminding y'all, I do not own and am not responsible 
>for the CL project. That is Mike's baby. I am concerned with SCL, not 
>CL.

I do not know what problems you perceived with the CL group,
but I cannot see any difference between the CL and SCL groups
as far as progress or lack thereof is concerned.

JS>>And as Nancy pointed out
>
PH>When did that happen, by the way?

Nancy, Harry, I, and miscellaneous other people were discussing
the glacial pace toward a standard at the ICCS meeting in
Dresden at the end of July.  Harry was willing to carry the
ball in the ISO court, and Nancy arranged to get funding for
him to do so.  I sent a note about that in August.

>Sure, but we need to ensure that it is indeed 'we' who are doing 
>this. That is, we need to speak for the group when telling people 
>what we are doing, or at least carefully distinguish our opinions 
>from the group's decisions.

Great!  Let's get a compendium of the group's decisions on
the CL web site so that we can point to it.

>They were not the only ones waiting, which is why I formed the SCL 
>group out of frustration.

It's the same people who are doing the work.   And putting
the letter S in front of the acronym doesn't do anything
to cause them to move faster.

>The SCL group has been in existence only for less than a year, has no 
>funds or external support, and has formally met only once. Under the 
>circumstances I think we are doing reasonably well.

Those attributes are also true of the CL group, since they're
basically the same people.

> ... Who ARE these 'ISO people'? Why are they not 
>mentioned by name, perhaps with their emails attached so that the 
>points can be discussed with them and maybe even an archived trail of 
>discussion laid down?

Pat, you have been invited to attend their meetings and never
bothered to show up.  You were in Santa Fe where the meetings
were held and left on the day before you could meet them.
Harry has been going to their meetings, so he can forward
any emails to you.  Basically, their concerns boil down
to one simple question:  (1) Where is the [S]CL document?

>... the central semantic problems with KIF that we have at long 
>last laid to rest or avoided in the SCL model theory, matters that 
>require some delicacy and care in the use of wording; so I would 
>prefer that, as far as possible, any discussion that bears on 
>technical SCL matters is done with me or Chris personally involved, 
>at least until we get the technical matters documented unambiguously, 
>which we have not yet completely succeeded in doing.

I have been well aware of those issues and the approach that
you and Chris have been taking.  I finally came around to
accepting the typeless semantics.   I have never been happy
with seqvars and have always wanted true sequences instead.
However, I am willing to go along with seqvars as a solution
to a problem that I believe was a mistake in KIF (and which
I would prefer to correct rather than perpetuate).

>It seems premature to be composing an ISO-compliant document in time 
>for Dec 17th when there are many technical issues still to discuss, 
>however.

I never said that we need a finished document with all the
ISO boilerplate by Dec 17th (or 12th).  But I believe we can
produce something better than what's now on the CL web site.

Can we schedule a telecon?  Perhaps for Nov 11?  Between now
and then, we should have everybody send in a short summary
of what they plan to do for the Dec 12th document and what
issues they feel should be addressed in the telecon.

John